Hamish and Dougal – Musical Evening

February 12th, 2010 Writing, radio

I’m writing down the script for Hamish and Dougal to learn how to write comedy. I’m writing a skit. So far, it is too risque because of its visual gags which means it could be scrapped and I’ve got a timeline to meet. Hamish & Dougal is a laugh every other second.

[Door Opens]
Hamish!
Dougal!
You’ve had your tea!
No…
As a matter of fact I’ve just finished mine!
Mine too, by the looks of it.
I’ll be looking forward to your company later on.
How will that be Dougal?
Hamish, I’m having a musical evening!
Ah…I’m the same after a baked bean supper
An entertainment! Jinks! What fun we’ll have!
There will be hijinks on the Glen as we speak!
I don’t doubt it!
I’m bursting to know, what on earth have you laid on?
I don’t know but it’s stained the back of my kilt
No….
No no. The entertainment.
Oh, a rare treat Hamish! Did you ever see the Edinburgh tattoo?
Oh, I glimsped it once when you were changing your sporran.
I am talking about the great national spectacle.
So am I!
Oh what am I thinking of.  Come away, man, rest your weary feet, pull up a chair, there is one in the celler.
[Sheep bleats.]
Glory be! What was that!
Oh, I’m in the middle of making a haggis.
That’s handy, I’ve just been to the bakers. Could you fancy a bannercake?
I could, old friend, but would I respect it in the morning?
That’s what you got to ask yourself.

High Table, Lower Orders

February 3rd, 2010 radio

Everything to love about Mark Taverner is in this show – Murder, insect specialists, claret drinkers, food lovers, pompous farts, wheezes, lazy old men, reunions with former girlfriend, pulling pants down to moon at authorities and rudeness. Especially the rudeness.

“Listen to this,”
“On the face of it…”
“Ugh.”
“What?”
“Unnecessary verbiage. What’s wrong with ‘outwardly’, or ’superficially’?”
“‘Superficially, this ancient seat of learning…’”
“No! No! No! What is this? A heroic attempt to win the world cliche record? Just ‘Cambridge’.”
“Superficially, Cambridge looks as it always has…”
[undertone] “…a bastion of privilege.”
“A bastion of privilege. Ugh! Shut up and listen!”
“But as the colleges prepare for their carol services…”
“Oh no! OH NO! Spare us in my mercy! Don’t tell me – ‘truly this is a bleak mid-winter for higher education’.”
“…truly this is a bleak mid-winter for higher education.”
“Tell me, what first attract you to a career in journalism?”
“Alright, so I’ve just got a bit rusty.”
“Rusty?”
“Go on then, you do it.”
“‘Superficially Cambridge looks the same’, colon. You know what one of those are, don’t you?”
“Ha ha.”
“‘Majestic dons make pronouncements of great brilliance and quaff clarets of great vintage.’”
“A bit OTT.”
“SSsssh!”
“‘The picture is forced. As colleges prepare for their carol services, the hymm they intone: Money don’t get everything it’s true; What it don’t get i can’t use; I want money.’ How’s that?”
“Bit flurry. Bit over-written”

Educating Rita vs An Education

January 7th, 2010 radio, screen

In ‘Educating Rita’,  Rita is a hairdresser by day and an open university student by night. Rita is not just seeking an education – she yearns to wear the dress that an educated person wears: the type of person who could speak cleverly, enjoy music, art or even provide a erudite commentary on Literature or Art. In short, Rita wants to be different from the people around her. She seeks this from Frank, an alcoholic lecturer who is sick of the culture and academia that Rita seeks and wants Rita to retain her charm, her spontaneity, her real self just the way she is. Frank thinks very little of Literature (ie, that capital L literature) because it has nothing to do with real life; it is empty.

In ‘An Education’ – a film based on a memoir/essay of Lyn Barber, the quarrel with the enjoyment of concerts, theatre, jazz and art is similar. Jenny thinks that attending these things, having the glamour of an older man courting her meant she would be thought of as sophisticated. (Jenny wasn’t completely naive. She knew things have to be paid for with money, or with her virginity.)

Unlike Rita who eventually learns from Trish’s (her glamourous room-mate who enjoys classical music, poetry, theatre) suicide that the dress of an educated person is nothing but a facade hiding the emptiness of her life, Jenny considers her escape to Oxford as a right decision from troublesome real life of a cheating boyfriend, of parents who claim to know everything.

Both stories have different ideas about education.  ‘An Education’ never resolved Jenny’s question to her headmistress: what is she, a woman, to look forward to after being educated? When marriage stopped being an option, Jenny decides she really wants to go to Oxford where she could read English.  It seems to me that the writers all agree that education is a right escape just because it is perceived as a better goal than getting married, having babies, wasting her brilliant talent. I don’t agree it is a better goal. It’s just the paths we choose to take.  I much prefer how ‘Educating Rita’ handled it. Rita wasn’t sure about getting married and having babies early – not that she thought it was a poorer option but that she wanted to be someone else for a change – an educated person – because her life was getting her down. On achieving her goal, Rita discovers that she loves idea of education so much that she didn’t want to question what she learnt and she was wrong – she had to question what she learnt, and not merely accept authority.

Both characters realise at some point in their story that they are reading too much into the choices of entertainment: for Rita, a dress; for Jenny, a pretend sophistication.  Yes, entertainments are what they are but to dismiss it, to rubbish such things because it doesn’t reflect real life?  Jenny had problems with real life and successfully escaped into Oxford.  Rita says that the tutorial hours are her escape from real life. Yet the writers want me to think real life is the tops and that artistic creations should show real life in it? I’m unconvinced.

Painting from life?

December 31st, 2009 elsewhere, radio

Listening to Van Gogh: Seeing Red on BBC it occurred to me how different his paintings were to his life. Van Gogh lived an isolated life and his intense relationships with Theo and Gaugin hinted of loneliness yet his art was not lonely. They were complete and happy to me.

Hopper who was not lonely, had friends and a supportive wife in Jo knew loneliness so well.

Barbara Novak tells a story about a party she and O’Doherty threw in the Sixties, towards the end of the Hoppers’ lives. Edward and Jo were the first to arrive. They sat down next to each other on a settee, and as the other guests – many of whom were the most successful artists of that new generation – piled in, they thought the Hoppers seemed happy and left them alone. Halfway through the party Novak turned to look at them and saw that a large empty space had been left around the Hoppers’ sofa. It was an image straight out of one of his paintings: even in a crowded room, they radiated isolation – together.

‘We don’t know what she died of,’ Novak says when I ask about Jo. ‘I think she died for lack of him. And,’ she adds, ‘he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie à deux.’

From here

On Chain Reaction (series 3 ep 3)

December 28th, 2009 radio

Phill Jupitus to John Lloyd on Stephen Fry:

PJ: I love Fry so much. The fact that you let me, take the piss out of Stephen on that show quite relentlessly [Laughs]. I’m like an oik to that man. He could crush me like a bug. But he doesn’t. Why not? Do you think he fancies me? [Crowd laughs] Come on, tell me. Is that it? A sexual thing? Did you just get me on to pacify him? [Crowd is helpless.] Is it like (mimicks Fry perfectly) “Well, don’t you forget to book the man Candy John … Maaaah…Where’s Pip? Maaah……”
JL: Have that font washed and sent to my tent.
PJ: Oh no, I’m just a boy whore!

Wicked wicked wicked impression of Fry. Does he really go Maaaah?

A lovely set up and punch line

December 3rd, 2009 radio

This is from Unbelievable Truth: On wooden postcards: Episode aired 2009-04-06

Lucy Porter: I once got a wooden Valentines’ card. I’m just showing off. I thought maybe someone did wooden postcards and they didn’t like it.
David Mitchell: Er, no, they didn’t. Sorry. But well done on the wooden Valentines’ card.
Chris Addison: Did you put out?
[A buzz from Graeme Garden. Interruption by Lucy.]
David Mitchell: Sorry, Lucy’s still boasting about her wooden post card.
Lucy Porter: I just want to make clear that I didn’t put out.
David Mitchell: You didn’t put out? Was it on fire?
Lucy Porter: No, it’s a term for having sexual intercourse.
David Mitchell: Oh well, that would explain why I wouldn’t know it.
[Laughter. Applause.]
David Mitchell: So you didn’t. Right. So it was essentially a waste of wood.
[Laughter. Applause.]

BRILLIANT.

From Our Man In Havana

August 7th, 2009 books, radio

Listening to this at work in between loud and long conversations, this jumped at me.

“I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the UTC and the British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment – he and I.” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh I forgot. There is something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, USA and USSR. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom.” I said I sympathised with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary System.”
“My God, you said all that?”
“Yes. It was quite a speech.”
“Did you believe it?”
“Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.”

When the plane lands and the control tower in Changi comes into view, does the heart feel heavy or light?

Where one chooses to put up one’s feet cannot be derived by drawing two columns and labeling one Pros and the other Cons. It is a feeling of inexplicable contentment, of sentimentality, of (even) relief. To some the cause of such feelings of goodwill is family – that tiny nation of two, three, four or more. For persons whose family does not generate such feelings of goodwill, perhaps friends play the part. What if neither friends nor family play the part – what then gives the heart it’s lightness? Adventure, curiosity, strangeness, newness. Or is it routine, old ways, traditions, familiar sounds?

On Time

July 26th, 2009 radio

Think about it this way, if I say a long time has passed, in fact I have used two metaphors because time cannot literally be long or short – not a piece of string. We’ve used a description from space and applied it to this abstract notion of time. When I said time has passed, that’s also metaphor because what really passes is a train or ships at night, not time. Time doesn’t literally go somewhere. So it’s not just that we need metaphor from space to talk about time, we need it to think about time cause we have not other way of conceptualising it, of visualising it.

Fry’s English Delight – Metaphors at 22:58

2009 Reith Lectures: Prof Michael Sandel Part 3

July 11th, 2009 radio

I like this lecture much more than the 1st and the 2nd of the 2009 series. I haven’t heard the 4th lecture but this is seriously the best so far.

He leads the listener from the start of the lecture, asking, what is wrong with genetic enhancements, and if this is safe, do we enhance our bodies and minds with engineering? If there is no discrimination, what is the objection to genetic engineering? This opening, while long, clears away what befuddles the question about genetic engineering and it is this: the drive to use life to our own purposes robs us the ability to appreciate gifts of nature.

Parental love should not be contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents can’t be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. This is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an “openness to the unbidden”.
…
In caring for the health of their children, parents don’t cast themselves as designers or convert their children into products of their will. The same can’t be said of parents who pay large sums to select the sex of their child or who aspire to bioengineer their child’s intellectual endowments or athletic abilities.

He gives an example of LKY’s (yes! SG!) incentives to graduate mothers to “stave the deplete of the talented” and even though there is no forced sterilisation, he finds the policy troublesome. But what is objectional? He calls this playing God and I’m glad he didn’t spend more than 1 line on the religious but instead explains that in being open to the unbidden, it teaches us to be humble,

“It invites us to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to reign in the impulse to control.”

Being open to the unbidden removes the possible excessive responsibility on the choice taken by the designer.

We attribute less to chance and more to choice. Parents become responsible for choosing, or failing to choose, the right traits for their children. Athletes become responsible for acquiring, or failing to acquire, the talents that will help their team win.

Finally, he talks about solidarity and giftedness:

So here’s the connection between solidarity and giftedness: a lively sense of the contingency of our gifts – an awareness that none of us is wholly responsible for his or her success – this saves a meritocratic society from sliding into the smug assumption that success is the crown of virtue, that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor

The best part of this lecture is this, even though it is rather viewing the world through rose colored glasses:

If genetic engineering enabled us to override the results of the genetic lottery, to replace chance with choice, the gifted character of human powers and achievements would recede and, with it, perhaps, our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. The successful would become even more likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient. The meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving.

Full Transcript of Genetics and Morality

I really like the world that he paints in this speech – it’s the speaking version of Louis Armstrong What A Beautiful World.

Thinking about what he said on genetic engineering, I wonder about plastic surgery, which was discussed briefly in the Q & A. I’ve said before that beauty isn’t the blind following of the celebrity of the day – we all have an innate ability to identify beauty.

Plastic surgery is not genetic engineering, but it does allow a person to choose, to a certain extent, the gift of beauty. Everyone objects to plastic surgery on a person who doesn’t need it – need it as in, the person doesn’t have a defect to correct – but the fact is, aesthetic surgery in Singapore is booming. What is objection behind enhancing a person’s looks? If a parent realises that the child is ugly and puts the child through some procedure to be more beautiful, what is the objection behind that?

Putting aside the emotional reaction to the word ugly and assume that there is an objective way to measure beauty. Let’s also pretend, like Sandel says, that all procedures are safe and achieves whatever objective the person intended.

Sandel made three points against genetic engineering because it changes humans:

• humility: being open to the unbidden, in this instance mean, rather than accepting the gift of beauty as a random act , instead it refers to being open to not just physical beauty. In other words, by being open to the unbidden, there is active promoting of other forms of attractiveness (let’s say, a great personality, wink/nudge) and there is reduced emphasis on physical beauty in society (and perhaps, the harm of the emphasis when there is unequal access to plastic surgery).
• responsibility: having the means to improving looks means that there is a responsibility for the parent or the individual to choose what appeals. In our pretend world, where beauty is objective (not subjective), we easily avoid the problem of a wrong choice. But that there is never the possibility of a wrong choice doesn’t dispel the illusion that having beauty in one’s toolkit is a +3 magic spell for being liked – that being liked (win friends, influence people) doesn’t take effort and hard work.
• solidarity: This is where it falters slightly. If he’s saying to use beauty for good society, like the way Princess Di brings the world’s attention to good causes, we could do that without beauty. Beauty is not a public good. Beauty, if it is a short cut to fitness, benefits only the individual having that gift. It is unlike a gift of art or mathematical genius, or science, etc where achievement in the sphere or art, of science, or math, etc translates to some benefit to the society when society recognises the achievement.

The objection to plastic surgery, is this: even though beauty is a mutually exclusive good that cannot be shared with society and it may be in a person’s self interest to do it, the harm to the society in permitting the flourishing in the trade of the plastic surgeons and other aesthetician is likely to be greater than any benefit derived as a whole.

2009 Reith Lectures: Prof Michael Sandel Part 2

June 28th, 2009 radio

The second lecture is more interesting than the first. It starts off from the idea that the personal is political. Sandel believes that to separate politics from the personal by ignoring the moral and religious opinions of the public is mistaken

…for two reasons: first, it’s not always possible to decide questions of justice and rights without resolving substantive moral questions…Arguments about justice and rights are unavoidably arguments about the moral meaning of the goods at stake. The second reason is that even where it may be possible, it may not be desirable.

But I don’t know if that is quite as practical. Ideally, all opinions (including moral and religious, etc) of all the people in a democracy must be considered carefully before deciding policy. In SG, what I’ve always found irritating is that instead of active debate to include all opinions in terms of policy making, politicians immediately create policies that lean towards the morality of the ‘conservative public’. Yes, can’t fault the party for not listening to the ‘conservative public’ but I’m not sure this ‘conservative public’ exists at all. I’m thinking that it’s the get-out-of-awkward-debate-card that gets waved about when there are slightly troublesome questions arise.

(Catch them all here.)